Family story.George Snedeker

 

FAMILY HISTORY

 
 
         My father parked his truck in the driveway and entered the house through the back door. He called out his wife’s name several times but she did not answer. When he came to the bathroom door, it was closed but not locked. He quickly opened it, realizing that something was waiting for him that he did not want to see! His wife was lying on the bathroom floor in a pool of her own blood. 
My father and his second wife, Nettie, were married. They lived on the farm with Mr. and Mrs. Farmer, the parents of his first wife, Delcy. She had been their only child and they left the four-acre farm to my father and his second wife, my mother. I’m not sure how my mother felt about living with the parents of my father’s first wife. The farm was a good piece of property. She probably thought of it as a bit of good luck.
 
My father was born in 1899. He and his family lived in the shadow of the poorhouse. When he was five years old, his two-year-old sister drowned while following a duck into a pond. This was a tragedy he never recovered from. He would repeat this story night after night at the dinner table. He also refused to let my sister and I go swimming because in his mind we would drown like his baby sister. Swimming lessons would have been better protection, but he saw no contradiction in his thinking about the matter of swimming and drowning. He would keep us safe. I can’t say who was supposed to be watching his sister when she followed the duck into the pond. Perhaps he was blamed for her death or perhaps he had just wished that she would go away.
As a young girl, my mother was forced to carry buckets of water from the well in the back yard into the house. When she was nine years old, her mother died of a heart attack and left her to face her father alone. When she was fifteen, he made her quit school to go to work in a cigar factory, later to work in his general store. 
He was a brutal man and she hated him with a passion. When he would drive up to our house in New Brunswick, my mother would make me pretend with her that we were not home so he would go away. To me, he seemed like an uninteresting old man. 
I can’t say with any certainty what kind of abuse he imposed on her as a child, but it was clear that the hurt she felt was great. She often told me how cheap and nasty he had always been to her. Her main complaint was that he had quickly remarried after her mother’s death, and that my mother was made to do housework and care for her stepsisters like a servant. My mother never mentioned sexual abuse, so I can’t say if any took place, but she certainly suffered from deep wounds that had never healed.
 
         There wasn’t much to do in the summer. My friends, Russell and his younger brother Tommy, went to Bible school even though they were not religious and did not attend church services. I went to church but did not go to Bible school. Sunday school was enough religion for me.
My parents thought that it was sinful for Russell and Tommy’s mother to sit on their front porch in shorts in the late afternoon. They thought that she was flirting with the truck drivers as they drove past on Rout 130. My mother never wore shorts. Mrs. Davis was young and attractive, but I don’t hold much with the idea that she flirted with the truck drivers. She was probably just getting some air since houses were not air-conditioned back in those days.
We threw stones at the back of the trucks as they raced by. My mother often scolded me for this saying: “What if you hit the truck’s gas tank and it explodes? How would that make you feel?” Somehow, this did not seem very likely to me to happen. At any rate, we continued our stone-throwing. We also threw stones at each other, which angered my father because he thought this was very dangerous since we could put out someone’s eye with one of our stones. He often yelled at me about stopping my stone-throwing but his yelling about this had little effect. We did not stop the stone fights, but I was careful not to throw stones at my friends when my father was home.
One day, Zip Koon hit me in the head with a rock that I did not see coming. It hurt like hell, but what bothered me even more than the pain in my head was the blood running down the side of my face and onto my undershirt. As soon as I saw the blood coming from my head, I ran home crying since I thought I was dying for sure.
My mother quickly put a cold compress over the open wound and called the doctor. My father was out of control with rage and kept yelling that he would kill whoever it was who threw the rock that hit me. I thought that he actually might do this so I was not about to tell him that Zip had thrown the rock. Instead, I quickly made up the story that I had fallen on some rocks while running. After my father cooled down, he and my mother brought me to see the doctor who put a clamp on my head to close the wound and stop the bleeding. I had always thought that stitches were used for such things and was a little disappointed by the clamp. At least, I was not going to bleed to death after all and my father had stopped talking about killing anyone.
 
         My parents never took a vacation. Such things were not part of their way of living. Their favorite form of leisure was going for drives in the family car, especially on Sunday afternoons. I hated these drives in the country. I’d much rather have stayed at home playing with my friends, but my parents would not hear of it, so I was forced to get into the car. I would start to cry because I did not want to go. My father’s response was to yell and tell me to, “Shut up, or I’ll give you something to cry about!” 
My parents found these drives to be interesting. My mother would usually drive while my father would tell her where to go and what roads to take. He yelled at her if she missed a turnoff, as if they had some special place they were going rather than just driving around. My father would also often comment about how things were changing when he saw new roads being built or power lines being put up. Once I had calmed down I would look out of the windows of the car at the billboards on the side of the highways and the cows in the fields. I asked my parents, but got no good answer, why the government had put up power lines across people’s farms. I also asked why the county put up snow fences on our property every winter, and was told that this kept the snow from blowing onto the highway that ran by our farm. While we were driving, my father would keep telling me how much I should enjoy the scenery since there were no trees or farms in Europe because of World War II. He told me that I should be glad that I had the trees and farms to look at. He made no comment about the billboards.
It was on drives like this that I first heard radio announcements about testing the special emergency alert system, after which the radio would go silent for a minute or two. When the radio returned, a man would say, “If this had been a real emergency, you would have been instructed to turn to the Conrad Alert System.” I was always annoyed by these interruptions since the most interesting thing about these drives in the country was listening to the music on the radio. The air raid siren sometimes would go off and we would have to pull to the side of the road until the siren stopped. It usually lasted about five minutes. All the cars would pull to the side of the road but as soon as the siren stopped they took off again.
I have to confess that I did not really object to the drives in the family car. What bothered me was being forced to go with my parents. They didn’t ask me if I’d like to go for a drive in the country. Once we were on the road, I liked seeing the cows in the fields and even the highway billboards were interesting with all the products they were trying to sell. I did object to the fact that we were not really going anywhere. I would have preferred going to an amusement park or to visit someone. Since my mother was often on the outs with her sisters and their families we seldom visited her relatives. When we did visit someone, they were usually my father’s distant cousins, who were old, had no children and were not very interesting. Being there usually meant that there was very little to do except to listen to elderly people talk about the good old days which were now gone forever. 
What I really objected to were the fights in the car between my father and mother. My father was often annoyed over nothing of consequence. He would tell my mother where to drive and often ended up yelling at her when she made the wrong turn. 
 
         Jim Simpson was my substitute grandfather. He and I often went berry and mushroom collecting in the woods behind our farm and on the surrounding farms. We had to ask the farmers if they minded if we picked mushrooms on their property. Jim would always make me wait outside the fence for him if there was a bull in the pasture along with the cows. He told me that bulls were dangerous and could not be trusted. If this was true, it was not clear to me why he was risking his life over a few mushrooms. I can’t remember a single bull which moved toward Jim from his spot in the pasture near the cows. 
         Jim and I generally got along pretty well. Sometimes he would get annoyed with me when I offered to help him with one of his farm tasks that he did not really need my help with. I responded to this insult by hiding his tools until he would let me help. He would say, “If you don’t behave, I’ll tell your father.” Since I was frightened of my father this usually worked. I was only trying to help out so I did not see what the big deal was. Perhaps Jim drank too much Geritol which in those days was known as “poor man’s gin.”
He and I often went for walks in the woods looking for blackberries or blueberries, which I ate most of before we made it home. My mother would make pies out of the remaining berries. Jim would never fail to point out bushes of inkberry, which were poison if you ate them. He also pointed out poison ivy and poison sumac which we tried our best to avoid. If we followed the trails long enough we would find our way out of the woods, not necessarily where we had entered, but this did not matter very much since we could find our way back to the farm. We often passed by piles of broken bottles in the woods. We had made one of these piles of bottles ourselves here not far from our bridge into the woods. Since we had no garbage collection, we burned our paper garbage and cans in a small fenced-in area in the middle of one of our fields and carted bottles into the woods where they were dumped into a pile. My friends and I would look through other people’s garbage piles in the woods to see if they threw away anything interesting. We would also sometimes just roam the trails in the woods to see if we could find our way out which often took hours because once you were in the woods you could no longer see the direction of the sun.
 
I recently asked my sister how Jim Simpson came to live with us on the farm. She told me that he had been living on another farm and that my father had taken him in to live with us. As I remember him, he was an old man in poor health who drank Geritol and did a little light work on the farm. He was my friend and substitute grandfather. He had been a sailor and had a pension so we did not have to pay him anything; we gave him a room and three meals a day.
During the daytime, I used to play in his room, where I kept two boxes of toys under his bed. I can’t ever remember him complaining about this. Once a year, he took a vacation on Long Island where he stayed with his sister for two weeks. During the periods of his absence the farm was a lonely place.
 
We kept about thirty chickens on the farm for eggs and on occasion we’d kill one for dinner. The killing of chickens was a revolting act to watch. It was done in one of two ways. Edson Koon, one of our neighbors, would hold the chicken’s neck down with one of his feet and chop the chicken’s head off with an ax. Then the bird would run around for a minute or two until it fell dead on the ground. Jim Simpson, our farm hand, would wring the chicken’s neck and then put it into a bucket of hot water to make its feathers easy to pluck in about an hour. Fortunately, we did not kill chickens very often.
These chickens were what are called today “free-range chickens” because they were let out into the yard to roam and eat. I used to enjoy feeding them the chicken feed and watermelon rinds. Jim always told me to never give them corn cobs to eat because these interfered with their laying of eggs. I can’t say why this would be the case. I also enjoyed collecting the eggs that the chickens would leave in their nests every couple of days. The chicken coop did smell bad, but this was something you got used to if you lived on a farm.
When we sold the farm to the real estate speculators, we still had the thirty chickens. My mother told me that the plan was to eat the chickens before vacating the farm. The only problem this posed was that one of the chickens was my pet chicken, but Mother told me not to worry because we would not eat that one. Well, before I knew it there were only about ten chickens left in the yard and none of them was my pet chicken. I asked Jim what happened to my pet chicken and he told me that we had to kill all the chickens before the end of the month that I could not take a pet chicken to our new house in New Brunswick. We could take the dog but that was all we could take in the way of pets. I ran into the house crying.
One day Jim trapped a sparrow in his hand and then proceeded to break the bird’s neck with his thumb and throw it to a cat who quickly ate it. This act of cruelty revolted me. Perhaps that was what Jim was trying to do. We killed mice and rats all the time in traps in the barn and the house. Jim also once killed a bat that he hit with his cap as it flew near us on a hot summer night. I didn’t feel much sympathy for rodents! Cats and chickens were a different story.
Jim made me a slingshot out of a tree branch in the shape of a “Y”, a thick rubber band and a small square of leather. It worked pretty well, but I was never much of a shot. I loaded stones into the slingshot and fired away at birds but never managed to kill a single one. This frustrated me at the time, but it’s just as well; there are no sparrows on my conscience.
When I was five years old, I accidentally killed a kitten I was playing with. I was 
making it crawl through a clay pipe. Just as its head was coming out of the end of the pipe, I dropped the pipe and broke the cat’s neck.
I didn’t mean to kill the cat. It was an accident. I was terrified; I put the kitten in the barn. He was still alive; his head was hanging. I prayed he would recover, but he did not recover!
I was afraid to tell my mother what I had done. When I told her, she said, “Put it into a bag and throw it into the woods.” My mother did not like cats very much.
 
I began attending Sunday school when I was six years old. I remember this clearly because my first Sunday school teacher was also my first grade teacher at the Maple Mead School. I can’t say very much about what we learned in Sunday school, mostly that Jesus loved us and that we should be good boys and girls to please Him. After the Sunday school lesson was over, Jessy Applegate would take the collection. My mother only gave me twenty-five cents so that was all I gave. I could tell from the look on the face of Jessy Applegate that she expected more than a quarter but that’s was all she got from me. 
My sister also taught Sunday school, until she met my brother-in-law who was a Catholic. She informed my parents that she wanted to convert to Catholicism to please his family, but my parents took this as a rejection of them. The odd thing was that my parents did not go to church and were not religious. I don’t think that I had a strong feeling about this change of religions since my sister was still going to be a Christian. I’ve never been very dogmatic about how people worship the Creator and I soon lost whatever faith I had anyway, even if my sister continued to be religious. I remember explaining to her mother-in-law that Protestants did not have saints that they prayed to. She said, “And what about the Virgin Mary”? I did not know the answer to this question so I gave no reply. 
My father was always fixing things around the house. One day he hit his finger with the hammer and said, “Goddamn it!” I ran out of the room and told my mother that my father had cursed at me. This seemed to work because I could hear my mother reprimand my father. Later, my father asked me why I had lied and told my mother that he had cursed at me when I knew that this was not true. I knew that he had me on this one so I kept quiet. I knew that I had tried to use the cursing to get back at my father for all the Sunday drives he had subjected me to. I also made my parents listen to me read from the Bible before they could eat dinner and I insisted on saying grace before every meal until I grew tired of this. I tried to be as perfect as Jesus but lacked the discipline this would take.
When I was twelve or thirteen I stopped going to Sunday school and began attending the regular church services which were very boring. We sang Protestant hymns, all of which were pretty dull stuff as far as music goes. Often I did not listen to the sermons and spent the time daydreaming. In the summer months, the church was very hot. Several local funeral parlors donated cardboard fans which we waved, but this was little help since there was very little air in the church. Going to church had become a real drag for me. However, in order to please my mother, I continued to attend for several years.
I also attended the Baptist Youth Fellowship meetings at the church every Friday night. My mother would take me and pick me up when the meetings were over. We played basketball, sang religious songs and memorized verses from the Bible. 
One night when we were doing our singing, I asked if we could sing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” which was a hit record at the time. Midge Maxwell, our youth leader, told me that we could not sing this song because it was only for “Negroes.” I was surprised to hear this since I did not think God would object.
 One problem I had was that a girl accused me of trying to look into the girl’s bathroom, and no matter how much I denied it they believed the girl over me. I’ve never been much interested in girl’s bathrooms. It is just not my thing!
 
My sister took me to the movies in New Brunswick since there were no movie theaters anywhere near the farm. In order to get to the movie theatres, we had to take the bus which took a half hour to get to downtown New Brunswick where the movie theatres were located.
My sister and father had many fights, mostly over boys she wanted to go out with. My father once chased a sailor away from the farm who was interested in dating my sister. My father had heard that sailors had girls in every port. It didn’t matter to him that we were nowhere near a port of any sort or that the young man was protecting us from communism. It was my sister’s honor that needed protecting. My sister had several girlfriends who would visit her on the farm. My father joked around with her girlfriends asking them to sit on his lap. None of them took him up on this offer but laughed as if this was a harmless joke. I’m not sure how harmless my mother thought the joking around with these young women was. It probably was an amusement for him.
 
While we were still living on the farm, my father worked for David Bosenberg who owned a nursery as well as the ten acres of woods behind our farm.
We had a good barn on the farm and kept the stable very clean. We grew a field of oats for the horse every summer. I used to think this was wheat, but it must have been oats. I think the horse grew old or was sold since I was about five the last time I remember having him on the farm. I wish I knew his name. My sister is the only one who might know, but she says that she cannot remember. I will call him “horse with no name.”
The horse was used to pull large trees out of the ground. We housed the horse on the farm, but he was owned by David Bosenberg, who was the richest man in the area. When we sold the farm, Bosenberg also sold his nursery. My father, at the age of fifty-six, with only a sixth grade education, had to find a new job. Every night he would look through the want ads in the local newspaper. Finally, he located a new job, in a cemetery, where he worked until his death in 1969.
The cemetery was called Franklin Memorial Park, which was surrounded by a hedge, and had no tombstones. Instead it marked the gravesites with flat metal plaques, which made it easy for my father to cut the grass. He also put in beds of flowerbeds and made the cemetery look like a park. He liked working outside so this job was not bad for him. He buried people a couple of days a week. He and his helper, a German named William Schmitt, were the gravediggers. I don’t think that burying people bothered my father very much except for stillborn babies, whose tiny coffins always brought tears to his eyes. 
After the pallbearers carried the body of the dead person to the gravesite, they would place the coffin onto a metal frame and then my father would turn a key which lowered the coffin into the ground before pushing the dirt on top of it. All of this was done after the funeral ceremony was over and the mourners had left the cemetery.
My father’s boss told him he could clean the office and wax the floors FOR extra pay in the building where the salesmen did their selling on Saturdays.
 
I would sometimes go to Franklin Memorial Park with my father to help him clean the office. The first thing we did when we got there was raise the flag. He showed me the proper way to fold and unfold the flag so it never touched the ground. My father was very respectful of the flag and all it stood for, but he never served in the military. He used to joke that he was too young for World War I and too old for World War II. He used to say that the only army he had ever been in was the Salvation Army. I used to wonder if he had resisted the draft in 1917 when he would have been eighteen, but then I found out that the draft age back then was twenty-one. He certainly would have been too old for World War II. I can’t imagine my father as either resisting the draft or serving in the army since he had such a horror of violence. He sometimes got into fights while drunk, but that is a different story. 
 
My father had an old Model T Ford truck that he had converted into a tractor which we used to cut the grass in the fields that were not used to grow crops. My father had to crank the tractor to get it started.  He built a seat for me on it from an old baby’s highchair that he nailed to the floor of the tractor. When I got to be about seven he would let me sit in the driver’s seat and drive while he sat behind me. The tractor only went about ten miles per hour but I still enjoyed driving it. My father would never let me drive the tractor into the garage for it which was behind the barn because he feared that I would drive into the back wall of the barn. I always protested giving up the driver’s seat to him but this did no good. 
When we sold the farm and moved to New Brunswick, my father sold the tractor to his boss, Walter Mason, for one dollar and took it to the Franklin Memorial Park where it was kept with the other machinery in a shed behind the main building. I often asked, but my father would never let me drive the tractor on the roads that went around the cemetery because he was afraid that I would hit something and he would get into trouble with his new boss.
 
My political education began in the Maple Mead School. On the front wall of the class room just above the blackboard there hung two giant portraits of Washington and Lincoln as well as the American flag that we saluted every day. In second grade we bought U.S. savings bonds. Each student had a book we pasted stamps into that we bought from our second grade teacher. Each stamp cost twenty-five cents. My mother gave me fifty cents every week to buy stamps. When your stamp book was full, it was worth $17.50 which would turn into $25 in ten years.
 
My parents were not political in any way that I can remember. My father liked President Eisenhower because he believed that Ike kept the country out of war. Both of my parents had a healthy fear and mistrust of government. I can remember my father saying that he thought that the police tortured people to get them to confess to crimes whether or not they were guilty. My mother said less about the long arm of the law, but she did not disagree with my father on this point. 
According to my parents, the most important thing was to keep out of the poorhouse. They felt that this could be done through honesty and hard work.
 
My mother was always one to speak her mind, and she never forgave anyone who had done her wrong. Her concerns were not with the larger world, but with her family. 
 
I have no doubt that my father loved me. The problem was that he didn’t know how to talk to children. He was the kind of man who would say, “If you don’t stop crying, I’ll give you something to cry about! “but he wouldn’t. He didn’t hit me; he only yelled a lot.